Convergence and transition auspice of Chinese regional growth

Author

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the question of regional convergence in China. Barro’s convergence model and Theil’s regional inequality index are applied in the study. Analytical results reject the absolute convergence hypothesis in the Chinese case, but suggest a conditional convergence pattern. As for China as one system, it is further discovered that there exists a complex phenomenon that the three regions, the east, the mid and the west, converge to different equilibria respectively. Therefore, the mid and the west break through the existing system structure to reach the high level like that of the east is a crucial task of Chinese economic development. A detailed inversed U-shape analysis leads to two important findings. First, it discovers that the regional disparities between the east region and the rest of China are widening, while the regional disparity between the mid and the west is shrinking. Second, the Chinese regional economy has reached the critical point of divergence-convergence transition in terms of stages of national economic development according to Williamson’s theoretical model. This gives the state government some room for doing something to make the convergence happen at an early possible time. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2004

Statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:anresc:v:38:y:2004:i:4:p:727-739. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Sonal Shukla) or (Rebekah McClure). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

We have no references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.